See comments about the role science must play to help BHO to get cap and trade passed. That’s the old left, viewing science for its use in service of the state. All this amid fretting that people will be distracted by things such as the economic collapse actually going on around them.

Trenberth see’s Ben Santer’s paper published in Science as having “substantial problems”, due to spurious artifacts introduced by radiosonde equipment changes over time making the ERA-15 data “corrupted” in Trenberth’s words. Two words sum the problem up: temporal inhomogeneity.

But, why wouldn’t he send this to Science? Instead he just sends around to (I presume) a few trusted members (pals) of the team? Oh, right, “the cause” and all that.

88 thoughts on “First look: 'Hit on the head with a hockey stick' – some selected emails from the recent NOAA FOIA release 2 years later”

Whoa – “The paleodata always got a lot more attention from the general public than it deserved.”
And just who plastered the hockey stick curve throughout the IPCC’s third report? I’m not sure if he’s trying to blame UEA (with many contributors to the TAR), or the “climate community” (is that the staid term for the warmista? He doesn’t seem to be including folks like Lindzen or McIntyre in the community even though they are influential members of some community).
I like “simplified and exaggerated,” I would think that the NRO could point to that and call it the staid term for “fraudulent.”

From Susan Solomon in the “IPCC Sausage Factory” letter linked above:
“Having a cochair who is not unhelpful and is easy to work with is very important. …
“Do you know Anthony Njong? I don’t know him but politically if he were broadly supported by sub-saharan africa, that would help get past election politics.”
Amazing, there are still those who claim the IPCC reports are scientific, not political, documents!

I don’t get it.
Decades ago, when I got my first experience with writing proposals for the solicitation of grants-in-aid to support research, I was told that under no conditions whatsoever was I ever to make an assertion that I knew to be false.
In other words, I was never to lie in order to make a better case for the premises and objectives of the project being proposed. That – I was told – was deceit practiced for the purpose of obtaining funds under false pretenses, and both a criminal theft of value as well as being an actionable civil transgression making me and my associates liable for restitution and punitive damages.
So why the hell aren’t the members of this “little clique of quacks who proclaim themselves the Consensus on Climate” being pursued by federal and state attorneys general as well as by civil process servers bent upon hounding them into bankruptcy for their manifold deceits on research grant requests as well as their other peculations?
–

Well, first off this is old news – Dec 2009.
Second, it seems they are still stuck on messaging. One sure fire way to get to the top of the media S*** list is to accuse them of bad ( or biased) reporting. Whether that accusation is justified or not is irrelevant. Same goes for taking pot-shots at the public’s intellect or attention span.
There’s one huge bucketful of conceit in the warmist community, and the aroma wafting from it is enough to make normal people run for hills.

You might want to redact some of the e-mail addresses.REPLY: They are all public, and can be located on the web, and aren’t click-able nor spamable in this form. NOAA didn’t see fit to redact them, knowing full well they would be discussed online, so not too worried – Anthony

Mann reminds me of the Wright Brothers. They wasted their lives and life energy suing everyone and making enemies when they should have been making airplanes. If Mann continues on this path he will forever be associated with the disgraced bitmap image of one of his early flawed efforts. The bulk of his career will be forgotten and he will be thought a life-long fool.

cui bono says:
August 22, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Give up on the jolly hockey sticks, guys. Try another sport – like tossing the caber. That would make Mann the prize tosser in the Team.
______________________
Should I publicly admit to laughing out loud at your post?

The Trenberth letter is pure climate “//$”%!
Santer must have had trouble walking after receiving that one.
This is almost as good if not better than CG 1 and 2.
Thank-you for persisting and fighting the good fight. We all owe you a debt of gratitude and many, many never to be paid taxes for carbon control.

John M: “What was all that whining about censorship of climate scientists during the Bush Administration?”
That was my first thought after tripping over that line in the emails. If there is a need for a coordinated narrative, produced by political spokesholes such as with the WH, then it is not science that we are concerned about. But if we are concerned about the narratives then the ‘private’ emails are part of the political record produced by the current regime in a democratic society.
One cannot pretend to be above and beyond politics — and thus deserving of opacity — when one is directly involved in political narratives. Otherwise known in quainter times as propaganda. Any pretense to the contrary has now been laid bare by the injection of the Whitehouse into establishing such propaganda for scientific endeavours.
On the all it seems like it would be best to return to the traditional validity of science: Replication and transparency. Not good for politics or grant proposals. But hey, what’re gonna do?

Gus Speth is quite a character. His wikipeida entry is very interesting. Long history of enviro activism (eco-lawyer). Currently affiliated with DEMOS…a groups that Obama help found
from a piece of his writing (via wikipedia)
Integral to the needed transformations is a change in values – a transition to
new habits of thought and a new consciousness captured well in the Earth
Charter, which urges us “ to bring forth a sustainable global society founded
on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture
of peace.”
what’s there not to like?

Take that, you, you, Revkin you.
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
From: Michael S…
Andy:
I will not send anymore of your blogs to my FYI e-mail list.
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
That oughta teach him, Michael.
I wish I was a cartoonist. Josh’ll have a field day with this nonsense.

John M says: “If I’ve got this right, this came from someone in the Dept. of Commerce (DOC) to a bunch of NOAA employees (Dec 4, 2009). Note that NOAA is organizationally in the DOC.”
And I always thought DOC stood for Department of Corrections.

cui bono says:
August 22, 2012 at 3:39 pmGive up on the jolly hockey sticks, guys. Try another sport – like tossing the caber. That would make Mann the prize tosser in the Team.
CB,
I don’t think that little pudge bucket can toss a caper, let alone a caber. He’d just get splinters in his lotion soft hands…. and never clear the ground with the caber.
No – Tossing the caber is man’s work, not Mann’s work. Don’t send a boy to do a man’s job.
MtK

The “Susan Solomon emails” document is actually an email originating from Gus Speth at Yale to a whole slew of people including many of the usual suspects such as Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Jim Hansen, and Stephen Schneider, as well as Susan Solomon. Donald Kennedy of Stanford is also included on this insider’s list, which illuminates his outspokenly partisan and unscientific editorship at Science Mag.
Jane Lubchenko, now administrator of the US NOAA, and John Holdren, now the White House Science Advisor are also on the list. One can see the source and inspiration of Obama’s choices for the direction of US science.
It’s interesting to see the expectation Gus Speth has of getting access to Barack Obama both before and after his swearing-in as president. Clearly these people have, and expect to have, ready access to Democratic power mongers.
The follow-up email from Berrian Moore, of Climate Central, is even more interesting. Climate Central bills itself as a “501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit organization,” that also claims to do independent scientific work. Heidi Cullen, notorious for calling for the decertification of all meteorologists who disagree with her, is Climate Central’s “VP for External Communications and Chief Climatologist.” So, Climate Central is a non-profit that is also an AGW lobby arm. Is that legal?
The most revealing of all was that Gus Speth mentioned his initiative alliance with Betsy Taylor, relaying the clearly unspoken expectation that all the scientists in the list agreed with his highly partisan focus. Betsy Taylor is on the Governing Board of “1Sky” (One-Sky). 1Sky is allied with 350.org and is an outspoken advocate of AGW, “green solutions,” and “sustainability;” irrational and insupportable ideas, all.
The 1Sky board also includes Van Jones, Barack Obama’s late-but-not-lamented choice for “Green Jobs Czar,” Anthony’s fav, Bill McKibben, and Gus Speth himself, the originator of the email thread.
Gus Speth is “Professor of Law, Vermont Law School. and from his CV appears to have begun in environmental law and the partisan advocacy required of a successful lawyer finally pushed him into an extreme position. He now finds himself, “currently serv[ing] on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Population Action International, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities.” That is, he ended up believing his own guff.
Betsy Taylor turns out to be “President of Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions,” which specializes in “high-impact, catalytic initiatives to address climate change and promote sustainable economic development.”
So there we have it: a whole slew of scientists including Susan Solomon, high-mucky-muck of the IPCC, secretly allying themselves with green partisans, climate alarmists, and income-conflicted consultants to exploit their channels to power, so as to influence the president-elect. Betsy Taylor probably stood to gain plenty of business, given the success of the venture. And their success must have been beyond their dreams, because two of their number (Lubchenco and Holdren) were appointed to President Obama’s inner science circle and a third (Van Jones) almost made it into a position to cripple the economy.
One peculiarity of the address list is the consistent redaction of Micheal MacCracken’s email address. All the others are visible. One wonders why the censoring of this one and no others.

In proper science, if “eminent physicists” or “great…intellect[s]” publicly dispute your scientific claims
1. it is an honour
2. you respond publicly
3. a polite scientific debate ensues
In “post-normal” climate science, you:
1. do not answer their arguments
2. pretend they don’t exist
3. claim that only “climatologists” are qualified to speak on climate
4. declare that 97% of climatologists speak in unison
5. declare the science to be settled
6. brand anyone who disagrees with you a “denier”
7. accuse them of being funded by oil-companies
8. question their motives
9. question their sanity
In public, that is. Whisperings within the climate science cabal are different.

I expect you’re aware that part of our problem is all the eminent physicists, like Freeman Dyson, who appear to be under the (understandable!) illusion that the IPCC consensus is based entirely on dodgy climate models. It seems that even so great an intellect as Dyson might be ignorant of what Archer explains so clearly and quickly.
Michael McIntyre
Centre for Atmospheric Science, Cambridge, U.K.http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/noaa-emails-reax-to-cg-1.pdf
page 11

Re Mr Mann
“The bulk of his career will be forgotten and he will be thought a life-long fool.”
I still have hope for Mr Mann to repent. Everyone is capable of it. Were he to do so, we should be ready with respectful acceptance. He can blow this whole thing open probably like no other individual on Earth. There are many who are beyond hope, or seem to be but Michael can still transform the mindless waste that has befallen (particularly) the Western world as the CAGW hype bites deeper and deeper into the bank accounts of the increasingly impoverished and deprived. What drives such a conversion no one can say, but self-realisation and an enlightened understanding of consequences is a powerful agent.
More surprising things have happened. For example, who would have thought that any small clique could impose such an extraordinary financial loss on billions of people around the planet with such a small number of erroneous guesses and downstream cover-ups! No one would have bet on their being able to pull it off. Too many voices of reason would speak up, right? Too much broad understanding in the science community to succeed with such a box of vaporous fluff. Well, this CAGW thing is once-and-for-all proof that scientists and academics are corruptible. Lots and lots and lots of them.
But never completely rule out personal transformation.

All communications on this issue are being coordinated with White House. Therefore, no communications to Hill or Press should go out without DOC coordinating with WH.

“What was all that whining about censorship of climate scientists during the Bush Administration?”
Wow, that may be the most significant revelation within this latest release of emails.
Hansen’s complaint that his rants had to be cleared by NASA management was the moment the global warming media machine went into high gear -funded by George Soros.
For the Soros funding see my comment here.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/24/fighting-the-mann/

cui bono wrote:
“Give up on the jolly hockey sticks, guys. Try another sport – like tossing the caber. That would make Mann the prize tosser in the Team.”
Mann method
1. carefully select caber
2. avoid any with a “latewood density” “divergence problem”
3. attempt to toss caber
4. when your caber fails to soar, hide the decline

My grandmother always told me >> “If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said”.
I agree and still follow that rule of thumb today, successfully!
Some folks, so obviously, don’t!

Crispin in Waterloo says:
August 22, 2012 at 6:25 pm
“Well, this CAGW thing is once-and-for-all proof that scientists and academics are corruptible. Lots and lots and lots of them.”
From a slightly different angle, it is a demonstration that when the science is not mature and the government steps on the funding accelerator then the result is corruption on a huge scale. Some very serious dissertations need to be written on this point.

If you see zebras in these emails that’s because you don’t give any legitimate credit to anyone who disagrees with what you want to believe. Pretty sad seeing this stuff as any sort of evidence against climate science when in fact it shows an honest belief in their work. There is nothing to see here…

drew says:
August 22, 2012 at 7:30 pm
If you see zebras in these emails that’s because you don’t give any legitimate credit to anyone who disagrees with what you want to believe. Pretty sad seeing this stuff as any sort of evidence against climate science when in fact it shows an honest belief in their work. There is nothing to see here…
————————
Read a bit more. What is sad is that some of them have guzzled the Kool-aid of a handful trying to stage this farce. So in a way I think you are correct and thousands have been misled by a few. Apparently you as well.
The core “Team” have known what they were doing for a very long time.

dp says:
August 22, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Mann reminds me of the Wright Brothers. They wasted their lives and life energy suing everyone..
===========================================================================The Wright brothers are universally known as the inventors of the airplane, I have a degree in aeronautics, which included studying the history aviation, and I never heard that they sued anybody, if Mann is like the Wright brothers he will go down as one of the most important people in history. I doubt that will happen.

drew: ” Pretty sad seeing this stuff as any sort of evidence against climate science when in fact it shows an honest belief in their work.”
And Hitler had an apparently sincere belief that the Jews were destructive of German Society. Whether he was correct or not has nothing at all to do with whether he believed he was correct or not. And no, there is no “But no, I don’t want to Godwin this..” clause attached.
One can simply go through the emails to find a plethora of insular echo chamber dehumanizations of the out-group. From the ClimageGate reax pdf we have ‘deniers’, ‘professional disinformers’ and an ‘unprecedented attack’ that needs to be counteracted by ‘talking points’, being ‘less concerned about defending the science than defending the integrity of our scientists’, that no communication should be had without being passed by the political minders (”… no communications … should go out without DOC coordinating with WH’), ‘formulating a communications strategy and talking points’, that address ‘legistlative outreach’, signing statments to ‘demonstrate the force of numbers who agree’, that ‘consensus is based on something far greater than any individual’, and other issues of appearance. Especially the notion that Freeman Dyson and other physicists are simply daft when they object to the physics in the models of climate science.
Do these notion support the idea that the folks involved are True Believers? Absolutely and in just the same manner as Uncle Adolf they’re ready to resort to any propagandic twist to sell you on the narrative that they are fighting the good fight against the Evil Jew. Or, in this case, our two-minutes hate is Skeptihassen.
It’s all fine and dandy that they’ve taken such a stance of religious fundamentalism to their weltanschauung as to their own correctness. But that’s not at all anything to do with science. Perhaps a Freudian issue in which dreams of smokestacks are actually phalluses and represent their repressed desire to have sex with someone that drives a Cadillac, an SUV, or owns an air-conditioned home. But self-flagellating Skepithassen and carbon internment camps to deflect from their guilty energy dreams has not one thing to do with the complete and total lack of empirically valid results in this wannabe field of science.
For that they’re left only dividing things into Climate Science and Jew Science. Beg pardon, I mean Denier Science.

Anthony Watts says:
August 22, 2012 at 8:10 pm
“I’m sure Joshua Halpern won’t be so amused when we put his emails on display”
Cannot wait !!! Wipe the smug off his mug. Two choices, he is deluded or he is deceptive. We all get what we deserve in the end. In his heart, he knows this.

The thing I always notice about these released emails is their incessant clamoring about Kerry, Gore, and the Democrats in general – they’re always upset, lamenting electoral losses by Democrat politicians. Is there any question which political party these so-called climate scientists kowtow to? It also proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their entire global warming theory is nothing more than a political means to reach their Utopian ends.

drew;
Pretty sad seeing this stuff as any sort of evidence against climate science when in fact it shows an honest belief in their work. >>>
Eli Rabett (aka Joshua Halpern who insists on referring to himself in the 3rd person as if he was royalty);
You folks are really reaching.>>>>>>
Really? We have Solomon p*ssing all over the paleo researchers (Jones, Mann, Briffa), we have Trenberth p*ssing all over Santer, and we have a “disaster for the climate community”.
So what happened to the consensus? Turns out there isn’t one? What happened to the science is settled? Turns out it isn’t? Why is climategate a disaster? Do you suppose it was a disaster because nothing wrong was found in the emails?
And all those question arise from just TWO emails in this batch. Just TWO.
drew I suppose is anonymous so he can afford to look the fool in defense of the indefensible. Eli Rabett aka Joshua Halpern though out to think twice about publicly doing the same.

TomT – the brothers were credited with inventing control surfaces. In the defense of that patent everyone in the industry made money selling airplanes but them. Their lawsuits included foreign nationals and Glenn Curtiss. It sapped them and cost them valuable business relationships. Wilbur spent his last two years of life in the defense of patents. By 1917 the patent had expired, Wilbur was dead, and Oroville had sold the company in 1915, and took his last flight in 1918. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Patent_war
Glenn Curtiss went on to invent (figuratively speaking) the aviation industry.
Your post is a good example of what they are wrongly remembered for. The airplane, and powered aircraft preexisted the Wright flier but none had three-axis controls that were effective. Their aircraft designs were deemed unsafe by the military. Patent concerns doomed them to maintaining faulty components of their design while others went on to innovative designs.
Mann is on that same path.

Greg Cavanagh says:
August 22, 2012 at 8:06 pm
The report threads read like a bunch of cannibals arguing over who they’ll eat last.
A very interesting read indeed.
————————————-
Cast your aspersions, they only strengthen the resolve.
Interesting how ?

@Theo Goodwin
>>“Well, this CAGW thing is once-and-for-all proof that scientists and academics are corruptible. Lots and lots and lots of them.”
>From a slightly different angle, it is a demonstration that when the science is not mature and the government steps on the funding accelerator then the result is corruption on a huge scale. Some very serious dissertations need to be written on this point.
I work with a social anthropologist who spent 4 years studying the Amerindians in Motto Grosso, Brazil. He compiled a 3-foot high stack of field notes on how they do things and why, what they believe about everything from dreams to who is in those satellites orbiting overhead. He helped bring them out of the stone age in a single generation.
All that is nothing compared with the analyses that will be done on the tribe that took science back a generation. There is so much still to be released. It is inconceivable that the “WH” was not coordinating with “Buck” across the pond on the same points. Clearly a decisions was made long before that there was to be a full scale scare story to create a ‘new economy’ with new energy sources that would be technologically dominated by the developed West who could afford to waste that much money. It is a sort of cold war spending idea that brought the USSR to its knees – they couldn’t compete. Climate fraud in service of geopolitics, yes? And all of NATO bought into this hare-brained scheme? Is this their plan to economically defeat China and India – with electric SUV’s?
Too bad about that crooked Wall Street banker thing – ok… things. Doesn’t look so affordable now. From what has pitched up already, this is Climategate III: let the lawsuits begin. Buy your popcorn at the kiosk out front (this is America). Buy two or more and you get a Carbon Tax ‘Eli Rebate’ coupon.

Eli Rabett wrote:
“You folks are really reaching.”
Anthony Watts wrote:
“I’m sure Joshua Halpern won’t be so amused when we put his emails on display”
Yeah, but I’m sure we will 🙂
For those who may not know. Eli Rabett is the troll pseudonym that Howard University Chemistry Professor Joshua Halpern hides behind.
As mentioned in this (interesting) article.http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_mccarthyism_part_i_joe

These documents really need to be in the original digital file format. They’ve given paper on purpose to make the job of searching harder. PDF files cannot be hosted in searchable form online. We know how they operate, they actually went to extra effort for this because emails are of course stored as text files. This should be raised with the FOI tribunal.

If Dr. Mann tried tossing the caber, if he did’t get it right it might fall back on top of him. He might have to duck and dive a bit.
Reminds me of something else that seems to be about to happen to him.

Dave A Said:
These documents really need to be in the original digital file format. They’ve given paper on purpose to make the job of searching harder. PDF files cannot be hosted in searchable form online. We know how they operate, they actually went to extra effort for this because emails are of course stored as text files. This should be raised with the FOI tribunal.
————————-
Absolutely Dave, this is clearly a double bladed sword for them, not only will it take longer to analyse the documents but it is easier for inadvertent errors and omissions to occur. If there was an email missing between two others how could you tell ?
Redaction is much safer and easier done electronically rather than relying on the human eye/brain thing.
Not only that, but NOAA claimed to have sent electronic documents too, but assuming there are no duplicates, why are these emails hard copy ?
To me, this is a clear attempt to stall. Make them pay!

The ‘sausage factory’ one is particularly interesting. It shows that the IPCC FAQ section saying that climate forecasting is much easier than weather (described by Pielke as “an absurd, scientifically unsupported claim”) was hyped up by Susan Hassol, a ‘climate change communicator’. There’s no mention of Hassol as an author in the IPCC report.

All these characters are not scientists. They are advocates; glorified community organizers. True scientists wouldn’t waste their time on all these politics, nor would they constantly worry about consensus. Consensus means nothing to a true scientist.
How different of a world this climate “science” is to pharma. I would love to file a new drug application based on the consensus of my colleagues, but sadly we have to show our work under intense scrutiny of external agencies.
Those climate “scientists” have it so easy. They never have to show their work and we all just have to trust their consensus.

That they, for the great part, honestly believe in their thesis and its vital importance for humanity is all the more pathetic in that they never seriously attempt to test it to destruction and to welcome others to share in the work of testing it. There is confirmation bias (seeing) and then there is bias towards confirmation (seeking).

Eli Rabett says:
August 22, 2012 at 7:34 pm
quote ”You folks are really reaching.”……..
Hmm, strikes me it should be you folks who should be doing the reaching! – even if only for a pen to draft your resignations!
Seriously, and with all due respect to any of the climate scientists involved in this whole process, I say, put you hands up now, if you feel you may have overstepped the mark. Sure, no-one likes to admit they made a mistake, (and an honest mistake is always acceptable !) – but if any of this shows deliberate posturing and deliberate fabrication/omission, etc, etc you folks won’t have a leg to stand on.
I would be absolutely certain that there are members of the alarmist community who are doubting their own actions, etc. These are the folk who need to clean their slates now, or risk association with the downfall of the CAGW scam (and potentially their own downfall). I know some will simply want to save their own skins – but I’m sure there are some genuine scientists out there in Alarmismland that have been duped just like the rest of us – they are the ones I am appealing to – and they are the ones to help put a stop to this BS earlier rather than later!

One peculiarity of the address list is the consistent redaction of Micheal MacCracken’s email address. All the others are visible. One wonders why the censoring of this one and no others.

If this is him, looks like his email address is clearly posted on his IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences) bio, along with address and phone #:http://www.iamas.org/People Profiles/MacCracken.html
I checked with a Googled address verifier, it’s good.http://verify-email.org/
Given the ISP (comcast.net), that might be a home office. I’ve heard of Comcast as a cable TV provider that also does internet and phone, but for the residential market, not for commercial.
Trivia question:
Bio page identifies him as “Past-President IAMAS (2007-2011)”
Bottom of bio page says:Page last update: 10 March 2004
Maintained by Dr John Turner, British Antarctic Survey
So did they know in 2004 when he’d be President,
Or is “last modified” not automatically updated?
I strongly suspect it’s the latter. And I find it troubling when prestigious organizations do things in a way that allow them to “slip in” changes without noting when they were made, or that changes were made at all.

Anthony – I dont want to presume ignorance but just in case you may not be aware – There are a number of text recognition packages available which could easily transfer the hard copies into word etc. Most notable/ common is onenote – which does it automatically. Scanning them all may be labout intensive unless you have a fancy scanner, but it occurred to me this would be a good way to enable searching of the documents for key words, and help dissemneiation – you know obvious stuff like cut paste is easier.
see http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14595/ocr-anything-with-onenote-2007-and-2010/ for how to

Email of Berrien Moore: “…open a dialogue with the President-elect on the scientific consensus and recent findings, which reflect the seriousness of the climate challenge, and…
The phrase “open a dialogue” is code for partisan lobbying to ensure that the President-elect kept his campaign promise that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”. The phrase “scientific consensus” refers to the near certainty that increasing the amount of CO2 causes warming that is mostly mild and beneficial, particularly making cold and dry places warmer and wetter. The phrase “recent findings” is code for laughable alarmist speculation like “low sea ice causes blocking”. The “serious of the climate challenge” reflects the reality that less than 0.01% of Americans would like their electricity rates to skyrocket.
Fortunately the President-elect was not an idiot.

kadaka you said: “Given the ISP (comcast.net), that might be a home office. I’ve heard of Comcast as a cable TV provider that also does internet and phone, but for the residential market, not for commercial.”
Comcast has a huge commercial presence as an isp, i’d say about half the businesses in my city that have internet at work use them as their internet provider. the other half uses Verizon DSL(no fios service, no other major isp’s around).

David Ross says:
August 22, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Thanks for the Dyson video. What he describes is genuine science. Nothing sexy about it. You put one foot in front of the other and you create the tools and experiments necessary to learn about a specific aspect of the warming question such as the net absorption of CO2 by plants. No Warmist has done any empirical work on this question. Warmists only do sexy stuff.
By contrast, the Trenberthian paradigm reduces all questions about warming to radiative transfer between sun and earth, treating earth as a black body, and the effects of CO2 on the transfer. That is why Trenberth can say that temperature change can cause clouds but clouds cannot cause temperature change. Given his “a priori” assumptions, all he has to do is pop everything into the supercomputer and become the prophet of climate doom. Trenberthians might have deduced from their “a priori” assumptions some connection between plants and CO2 but you can bet that the empirical component of the work is trivial.

So once again, the team doesn’t see the issue as bad science, bad data, bad methodology, sloppy statistics or the fact that the real-world climate doesn’t match the computer models’ output.
The problem is PR. They feel they need more salesmanship. They need to find a compelling story, and create a meme that keeps the public buzz going.

more soylent green! says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:29 am
Yes! The fact that there are such things as graduate programs in “science communication” shows how low our standards have fallen. Derrida and postmodern literary theory now trump science.

Maus says:
August 22, 2012 at 8:20 pm
I found your rhetoric to be really entertaining and I also agreed with your sentiment. I think it is important to realise that the type of information viewed is from emails where nobody purports there is validated scientific content. I would think the only evaluation that would be appropriate is whether their character can be maligned and intentions known as easily as some make it appear. If these scientists want to use manipulation tactics to make people align themselves with their agenda then that isn’t unusual seeing as every facet of life is involved with manipulation. And secondly, this doesn’t alter that this is entirely consistent with their position that they believe their scientific research is ‘robust’. You also made issue with the disagreements and snark between researchers and certain analysis and you make mockery of the claim that the science is settled. Scientists are always finding new information and constantly criticise eachother and puff up their egos. These emails are not dramatic and this conspiracy talk by taking email fragments and applying malice to the authors will always lead to a fictional analysis in your interpretive favor. I just see no benefit out of analysing these emails at all except to sow discord… and that to me appears manipulative.
davidmhoffer says:
August 22, 2012 at 8:59 pm
If you care about ideas then the identity or authority of a person doesn’t mean anything. I believe WUWT pretty much have that as their mission statement.

Kevin Trenberth’s comments on Ben Santer’s July 2003 Science paper are interesting for a number of reasons. First, and most trivially, we see what it takes for KT to critically appraise an AGW paper: defense of his own work. All of KT’s citations contravening Ben Santer’s Science paper are to his own published first-author work.
Second, crediting KT’s actual criticisms, Ben Santer’s 2003 paper is worse than flawed. It reflects incompetence. Ben Santer should have known the data on which his paper rested were completely unreliable.
Third, Ben Santer’s article has 143 citations listed in Web of Science, right up through June 2012. His results were disputed in a short Science article, March 19 2004, by T. Chase and R. Pielke Sr., and defended by B. Santer & friends in the same issue. However, it appears that Kevin Trenberth never published his critique. He let a paper that he knew is fatally flawed stand in Science Magazine, where it has misled other scientists ever since.
Given the rapid team response to papers that contest their AGW view, one can only suppose that Kevin Trenberth’s public silence was studied. For example, Kevin Trenberth was a co-author on the infamous and dishonestly accelerated 2003 Eos paper attacking Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. So, it when suits Kevin he’ll attack papers quickly.
Most here will also remember that Steve McIntyre showed that the Kevin Trenberth co-authored 2003 Eos paper included a Figure that dishonestly truncated Keith Briffa’s embarrassing spaghetti graph divergence. So, fatal flaws apparently don’t bother Kevin when they’re properly flawed.
Ben Santer’s 2003 Science paper was properly flawed, of course, but from Kevin’s perspective its flaw was taken out of his hide. And that apparently transgressed Kevin’s limit. Now we know his evident order of importance: ego first, then AGW, then scientific integrity.
Fourth, all of the flaws Kevin Trenberth found in Ben Santer’s paper should have been caught by a competent knowledgeable reviewer. However, they were not. This indicates that the reviewers deployed by Science Magazine were — at least in that case — incompetent and ignorant. Donald Kennedy was the Editor-in-Chief of Science Magazine during this time. He would have been responsible for the review process. Donald Kennedy was an outspoken partisan of AGW, providing a possible explanation for the uncritical review of Ben Santer’s submission.
Finally, Ben Santer has published extensively on attribution of recent warming to a human cause. The 2003 Science paper was part of that effort. Ben has had a vital interest in proving human causality ever since he illicitly wrote the attribution lie into the SPM of the IPCC 2AR in 1995. Call the subsequent effort to prove attribution Ben’s post hoc auto-absolution for a prior sin. If he can prove attribution, his past lie becomes a prescient truth. He’ll have to live with that. Public honors never remove a private stain.

Here is the type of brazen “science” in the public interest being promoted on that Climate Central web site:
“Asking whether it’s natural or caused by humans is silly,” said Eric Steig, of the University of Washington, who wrote a Nature commentary on the new research. “We’ve changed the atmosphere so dramatically that it has to be mostly human.

cui bono says:
August 22, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Give up on the jolly hockey sticks, guys. Try another sport – like tossing the caber. That would make Mann the prize tosser in the Team.
Am I the only one who got “Mann the prize tosser”?

Theo Goodwin says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:40 am
more soylent green! says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:29 am
Yes! The fact that there are such things as graduate programs in “science communication” shows how low our standards have fallen. Derrida and postmodern literary theory now trump science.

“We’ve changed the atmosphere so dramatically that it has to be mostly human.”
Substitute:
Flat earth, Atlas holding up the earth, a giant turtle holding up the earth, the sun goes around the earth, alchemy, the earth being a mere 6000 yrs old, etc
THEY ALL MUST BE TRUE TOO. Oh wait…

RobW,
You noticed that logical fallacy too, I see. It is called the Argumentum ad Ignorantium, the argument from ignorance: “Since we can’t think of any other explanation, then it must be due to human activity.”
But that’s all hogwash. The currently observed climate is quite normal. It has been much warmer, and much colder in the past, when CO2 levels were well below today’s. We have actually been fortunate enough to be living in a “Goldilocks” climate. When things get back to ‘normal’, watch out! It will be all downhill from here.

I liked this line in reaction to CG1 first breaking.
“I assume this will be with us for some weeks and then fade away.”
At first I thought that prediction must have been made by Hansen but that would have been to good to be true.
(It was by Eystein.)

Pat Frank says:
August 23, 2012 at 11:00 am
Second, crediting KT’s actual criticisms, Ben Santer’s 2003 paper is worse than flawed. It reflects incompetence. Ben Santer should have known the data on which his paper rested were completely unreliable. etc.
That makes me curious what Trenberth thinks of Santer’s 17 years now that RSS is within striking distance of that with 15 years and 8 months of no warming. Seehttps://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2011/Nov/NR-11-11-03.html

[Theo Goodwin says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:40 am
more soylent green! says:
August 23, 2012 at 9:29 am
Yes! The fact that there are such things as graduate programs in “science communication” shows how low our standards have fallen. Derrida and postmodern literary theory now trump science.]
Actually, that is a necessary course to take if you want to be taken seriously in your research. It was called Technical Journalism 301 when I took it in 1976.
However, if your goal is to be scientifically literate while defending bogus conclusions, then not so much.

Werner Brozek says:
August 23, 2012 at 6:42 pm
That makes me curious what Trenberth thinks of Santer’s 17 years now that RSS is within striking distance of that with 15 years and 8 months of no warming.
>>Obviously, Santer et al. will come out with a paper upping the 17 years to 20. With a follow-up making that 25, in about five years. Science must keep up with the data.
Or, they’ll do a better job at getting the data to keep up with the “science”.

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